The attitude of the law toward a class of men is a fair criterion of their status; but this is not true of the women. Since they do not constitute a distinct class or industrial stratum, law is more apt to reflect their status as determined by tradition and custom, than to determine their status. Mommsen below says, “Wife and child did not exist merely for the house-father’s sake in the sense in which property exists only for the proprietor, or in which the subjects of an absolute state exist only for the king; they were the objects indeed of a legal right, on his part, but they had at the same time capacities of right of their own; they were not things but persons. Their rights were dormant in respect of exercise, simply because the unity of the household demanded that it should be governed by a single representative.”[19] Long before legislation took a more enlightened attitude toward the legal and political rights of women, the old laws relating to women had become antiquated. “Even in public matters women already began to have a will of their own and occasionally, as Cato thought, ‘to rule the rulers of the world.’”[20] Irrespective of the legal and social status of women, early history shows practically the same division of work between the sexes as in primitive times. If there is any apparent difference, it is in a greater diversity of household tasks for women, and the narrowing of the limits of their out-of-door tasks. Men continue to make inroads upon the increasing industrial work of women without changing the nature of it in any of its essentials. In Rome within the house “woman was not servant but mistress.” Exempted from the tasks of corn-grinding and cooking which according to Roman ideas belonged to the menials, the Roman housewife devoted herself in the main to the superintendence of her maid servants, and to the accompanying labours of the distaff, which was to woman what the plow was to man.[21] The characteristic work of the Roman women of the well-to-do classes was practically that of the well-to-do classes of all early civilizations. The work, however, of the wives of the poor was in marked contrast. The Ligurian women “laboured, like the men, at the hardest work, and hired themselves out for the harvest in the neighboring countries.”[22] History throws little light upon the conditions of the laboring people in early civilization. Although they were the foundation on which society rested, they were considered of no consequence in the development of the state excepting in their capacity as warriors. Hence, our knowledge of the manners and customs of the people must be gleaned from data regarding the well-to-do classes.